PLANNING AND EVALUATION CORE This section describes the Planning and Evaluation Core. The overall goal of the Planning and Evaluation Core is to assess the progress of the collaboration. Toward that end, the Planning and Evaluation Core will review the various components of the partnership to ensure that the goals and objectives of the collaboration are met. The committees established in this Core will meet regularly to review and establish short- and longterm goals, progress of the projects, and will review new pilot projects for the development Core. Internal Processes The Internal Advisory Committee (IAC) is comprised of scientists at the FHCRC and NMSU. Each individual was selected based on his/her knowledge and expertise of areas related to this application. The IAC membership is briefly described below. New Mexico Members Carl Kendall. Dr. Kendall is the new holder of the Stan Fulton Endowed Chair in Health Disparities and director for the Southwest Center for Health Disparities Research. He also serves as Associate Dean for Research for the College of Health and Human Services at NMSU. Kendall is new to NMSU after a career at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in Louisiana, and The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Pubic Health. Dr. Kendall received the distinguished research faculty award from Tulane for 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005. He has collaborated with colleagues at the Tulane Cancer Center and the Louisiana Cancer Consortium where he mentored junior faculty to develop proposals to enhance breast cancer screening among African-American populations. He has collaborated with colleagues in more than 40 countries to address global problems of maternal and childhood illnesses, vector-borne diseases, and HIV/AIDS. Currently Kendall manages projects in eight countries with full-time staff in four of those countries. Dr. Kendall is fluent in Spanish and has taught university graduate courses in Spain and Guatemala. Vimal Chaitanva. Before becoming the NMSU Vice President for Research Graduate Studies and International Programs in July 2006, Dr. Chaitanya was the director of the Advanced Materials Processing and Analysis Center (AMPAC) at the University of Central Florida (UCF). He was also the director of UCF's Materials Science and Engineering program and its Materials Characterization Facility. Dr. Chaitanya received the University of Central Florida's Research Achievement Award in 2002 and the UCF Leadership Award in 1999. He is a five-time winner of his academic department's Researcher of the Year award. He has a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a master's degree in bioengineering from Clemson University in South Carolina, and a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from M.S. University of Baroda, India. Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Members Harmit S. Malik. Dr. Malik is an Assistant Member at the FHCRC and an Affiliate Assistant Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. Dr. Malik's lab is interested in evolutionary studies of genetic conflict to gain insights into their mechanisms and consequences. Genomes are a tenuous conglomerate of different genetics entities, each trying to maximize their own evolutionary success, often at great cost to their genomic neighbors. This can create problems for the host organism. To gain insights into these mechanisms, Dr. Malik's lab studies centromeres, mobile genetic elements, and rapidly evolving proteins in Drosophila. Dr. Malik will provide great expertise in biology and the drosophila studies. Julian Simon. Dr. Simon is an Associate Member at the FHCRC and an Affiliate Associate Professor in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Program at the University of Washington. The aim of his lab is to identify new anticancer drugs. This is done through using the genetic context of the cancer cell as the drug target. The second broad strategy is to use chemical genetics to find better anticancer drugs. Other projects in the lab include the study of genetic interactions of mismatch repair mutants with ribonucleotide reductase as a strategy for the identification of drugs for the treatment of tumors with mismatch repair defects. Dr. Simon was involved in the U56 and has excellent understanding of how the collaboration operates. Ad Hoc Members ' ' Whenever there is a call for new proposals within the U54 collaboration, a "study section" will be convened to review and critique the proposals. We followed this format during the U56 award and found this to be an effective way to match proposals with expertise in the areas covered by the proposal. Members from both institutions will be identified and recruited by the IAC to review proposals (see below). These reviewers will form a study section to discuss and rank the proposals received and to make recommendations for improvements.